Hugo Chávez: quick guide

Who is he?

President of Venezuela since 1998, Hugo Chávez is one of the most charismatic, colourful and controversial politicians in the world. He is widely depicted in the mass media worldwide as a kind of monster, a communist-dictator-in-the-making who has destroyed Venezuela’s economy, fomented class warfare, trampled on human rights, attacked the free press, and undermined democracy. The truth is far more interesting.

What’s his story?

Born in a mud hut in the impoverished Venezuelan countryside, at seventeen Chávez entered the country’s prestigious military academy, mainly to play baseball and pursue his dream of pitching in the major leagues. When he discovered South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, he decided instead to launch a mission to change his country. Disgusted by his nation’s rampant corruption and moral decay, Chávez created a clandestine cell dedicated to studying the Liberator’s teachings and cultivated an underground following of like-minded progressives and nationalists.

In 1992 the conspiracy burst into public view when Chávez led a failed coup attempt against President Pérez. Chávez landed in jail for two years, but became a hero to millions of impoverished Venezuelans for standing up to a corrupt ruling elite.

In 1997, having given up on the possibility of another coup attempt, Chávez changed tack and launched a campaign to win the presidency. The eyes of the Venezuelan elite were on his opponent, the former Miss World winner and successful mayor Irene Sáez, but Chávez’s fiery rhetoric captured the imagination of millions of shantytown residents who had long been seething over the nation’s vast gap between rich and poor. Chávez won the December 1998 election in a 56 to 40 per cent landslide.

What are his policies?

Chávez is a mix of many things: socialism and capitalism, conservative economics and liberal social programmes. He is seeking a new path, something between ‘savage capitalism’ and failed communism. He calls it socialism for the twenty-first century. When asked to define himself, he once said simply, ‘I’m a revolutionary’.

He started his presidency by nationalising the state oil giant PDVSA and reviving OPEC. By helping to take world oil prices from rock bottom to record highs, he boosted Venezuela’s income from $14bn in 1998 to $40bn in 2006, but these policies have brought him into conflict with the IMF and the World Bank, the major oil companies and the USA (culminating in the oil strike and attempted coup in 2002).

He also instituted a series of New Deal-like ‘social missions’ that became the hallmark of his first term as president, teaching a million and a half illiterate Venezuelans to read, subsidising food markets, opening soup kitchens, and redistributing land. He pursued his dream of implementing Bolivar’s vision of a United Latin America, creating a television news network that spanned the region, selling cheap oil to his neighbours, and proposing a continent-wide oil cartel: a Latino OPEC.

How has he been perceived?

Most of Venezuela’s fabulously wealthy upper class despise Chávez, as do other interconnected power elites who used to control Venezuela. They include many members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, business leaders, union bosses and powerful media barons. Aligning itself with Venezuela’s elites, the Bush administration has openly pushed for Chávez’s demise. Top political leaders from both parties in the United States are keen to paint him as a dictator and heir to Castro and consider him a pariah, egged on by the mass-media depiction of him as a crazed leftist dictator, and indeed by many of his own incendiary statements.

To Chávez’s supporters, however, he has been the first president in Venezuela’s history to stand up for the millions of poor people who make up the majority of the population. Venezuela possesses the largest oil reserves in the world outside the Middle East and is one of the largest foreign suppliers to the United States, yet when Chávez came to power 80% of the population was mired in poverty; most blamed a corrupt ruling elite for pillaging the oil wealth and amassing private fortunes. Chávez has taken control of the oil industry, implemented laws taking a larger share of the profits from foreign oil companies, and instituted a historic shift of the revenues to the majority poor. His new Bolivarian schools and social missions are providing the underclass with a fresh chance at health, education and sustained prosperity, and a participatory democracy model has energised and incorporated millions of previously disenfranchised people into the political process. In the impoverished barrios and countryside of Venezuela, therefore, Chávez remains a hero, the man who is leading Venezuela out of its bleak abyss and paving a way for underdeveloped nations around the world to emerge from centuries of misery and exploitation.

His first political defeat, in the 2007 Referendum, signalled a change in public opinion. Many voters had become anxious about his apparent shift in affinity from Simon Bolivar, the country’s Liberator, to the more extreme, and less familiar, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. His soaring rhetoric about the revolution and coming socialist utopia stood in stark contrast to many of the everyday problems in Venezuela, including crime and corruption; some therefore felt that he was losing touch with his people.

Why is he so controversial?

His rhetoric, often viscerally anti-American, is famously direct: in addition to referring to him as a ‘fool’, a ‘drunk’ and a ‘donkey’, he denounced George W Bush as ‘the devil’ on the floor of the UN general Assembly in 2006, claiming that he could ‘smell the sulphur still’ from Bush’s visit the previous day. In 2002 he dismissed the wealthy elites who led the opposition as ‘squealing pigs’ and ‘rancid oligarchs’, and denounced the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in Venezuela as a ‘tumor’ of ‘devils in vestments’. Chávez has also flaunted his relationship with Fidel Castro, paid a visit to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and developed an alliance with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If he’s so popular, why did he lose the 2007 Referendum?

In December 2007, Chávez suffered the political defeat of his life: voters rejected, by a 51 to 49 per cent majority, a controversial national referendum aimed at pushing forward his 21st Century Socialism project and abolishing limits on him running for re-election. In addition to improved social security for the self-employed, lowering the voting age to 16, and the banning of discrimination against homosexuals, the reforms would officially declare Venezuela a socialist nation – communal and social forms of property would be created, and the Central Bank’s autonomy would be reduced.

After winning his landslide victory in 2006, Chávez had stepped up his rhetoric about 21st Century Socialism. He took more and more to citing Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, which – especially when caricatured by the media – led to anxiety about exactly where he was leading his country. From the start of his presidency Chávez had couched his movement in terms of Simon Bolivar, who – as a native son and the Liberator of Venezuela – was an inspiration to Venezuelans. Now, it seemed, he was overreaching: most Venezuelans wanted social justice, but not a Cuba-style system or anything that remotely reminded them of it.
There was also concern that he was losing touch with his electorate: street crime and corruption remain serious problems in Venezuela, and the nation’s currency, the Bolivar, is badly overvalued. Although he will now have to stand down in 2013, he shows no signs of giving up. Chávez promised in January 2008 that ‘we are going to make this year one of truly deep revision, of rectification, and of revitalizing the revolutionary process.’

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